Bibi
sat in the neuro-suite at Small Torus Station wearing nothing but a paper
exam gown, vulnerable and docile in her nakedness. She hadn't seen anything
tropical at the Elevator Base, not a glimpse of a mangrove swamp or a
palm tree: now there was nothing to tell her that she was already in Outer
Space. She knew she weighed maybe half what she'd weighed on earth (gravity
was expensive), but she couldn't feel the difference. The micro-gravity
games arena at Gagarin Circus had been more convincing. Honesty had elected
to make the transit to Speranza in dreamtime. Bibi wanted to be awake.
That was why she was here, having passed the physical that everyone had
to take. She was terrified of the Buonarotti process, but the idea that
she would be having a fake experience, which was like being in prison,
while her real mind and body were taken apart, scared her even more. .
.read on

Fictional History

What to do about Space Opera backstory?
How do you handle the "getting there from here" aspect of the
unforseeable future? I'm using a history i prepared earlier for the Buonarotti
Transit -discovered, lost and found again over the course of the Aleutian
Rule on Earth. Plus the prehistory: the emergence of Newurophysics and
Mind/Matter tech, from a fusion of occult beliefs and neuroscience, in
the 21st Century CE. Attentive Gwyneth Jones readers may notice that Japan
didn't actually sink, Misha Connelly's father gets a namecheck in a military
history lesson, the perils of mind/matter tech are the same as in Bold
As Love; and Li Xi-feng's World State didn't last -must have collapsed
when the Gender War broke out- but she is remembered as First Emperor.

THE STORIES

The
Fulcrum
(God's lonely lovejuice! Of course I was channelling the great M. John
Harrison. I read Light, and I thought of this.)The Voyage Out
(On the way to Botany Bay: a prison story)Saving Tiamaat
(A difficult issue for the Diaspora Parliament)The Tomb Wife
(A ghost story set on a non-duration starship)Gravegoods
(proto-Buonarotti story)

ESCAPE PLANS: Normal space is a bust, the size
of the universe is an illusion, our solar system is in a local area that's
trapped in a Black Hole, how the hell do we get out of here? Millie Mohun,
a direct-cortical sports star with a secret, meets ALIC, a privileged
tourist from the Lagrange habitats, where the great systems are honoured
like a Pantheon of Roman Gods. ALIC takes a dive into the teeming warrens
tastefully concealed under the beautiful park world of Earth, where the
masses live in poverty and concoct weird religions. My Higgs Boson novel.